Page:Pollyanna Grows Up.djvu/78

60 "That's just it. They don't ever think—or notice, crowds don't."

"But some folks do. We can be glad some do," urged Pollyanna. "Now when I—"

"Oh, yes, some do," interrupted the other. As she spoke she shivered and looked fearfully down the path beyond Pollyanna. "Some notice—too much."

Pollyanna shrank back in dismay. Repeated rebuffs that afternoon had given her a new sensitiveness.

"Do you mean—me?" she stammered. "That you wished I hadn't—noticed—you?"

"No, no, kiddie! I meant—some one quite different from you. Some one that hadn't ought to notice. I was glad to have you speak, only—I thought at first it was some one from home."

"Oh, then you don't live here, either, any more than I do—I mean, for keeps."

"Oh, yes, I live here now," sighed the girl; "that is, if you can call it living—what I do."

"What do you do?" asked Pollyanna interestedly.

"Do? I'll tell you what I do," cried the other, with sudden bitterness. "From morning till night I sell fluffy laces and perky bows to girls that laugh and talk and know each other. Then I go home to a little back room up three flights just big enough to hold a lumpy cot-bed, a washstand with a nicked pitcher, one rickety chair, and me. It's like a furnace in the summer and an ice box in the winter; but it's all the place I've got, and I'm supposed to stay in it—when I ain't workin'. But I've come out to-day. I ain't goin' to